NEWS: Miscellaneous.....

Listening in at the Leveson Inquiry

The media scandal started with a single rogue reporter but is now tainting British governments, both past and present.

Listening Post Last Modified: 02 Jun 2012 07:56

LINK: Listening in at the Leveson Inquiry - Listening Post - Al Jazeera English

On Listening Post this week: Listening in at the Leveson Inquiry: Former British prime minister Tony Blair and cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt take the stand. And, the Washington Post 40 years after Watergate.

It has been one of the biggest, most protracted media scandals the world has ever seen. It started with a single rogue reporter but is now tainting British governments, both past and present, and could very lead to new set of rules and regulations for the UK media. This week, the drama intensifies at the Leveson Inquiry as former prime minister Tony Blair and current cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt take to the stand. 

This week's News Bytes: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is one step closer to being extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault; the BBC misuses a picture from Iraq to illustrate its report on an alleged massacre in Syria; a small legal victory for a magazine in Myanmar could prove significant in the country's battle for a free press; and a media blackout in Greece after journalists there go on a nationwide strike.

In 1972, a bungled burglary at the Democratic Party's office in Washington triggered one of the most famous political scandals in history. Watergate led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, the only US president ever to do so, and launched the Washington Post into the media hall of fame thanks to the work of two of its reporters on that story. Since then the names of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have been synonymous with quality investigative journalism. But 40 years later, times have changed - and the Post is a shadow of its former self. Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro takes a look at the legacy of the Washington Post and the challenges for investigative journalism in a digital age.

Our Internet Video of the Week: It is a story that has shaken up the political establishment, threatened to bring down a media empire and exposed ties between politicians, the police and the press. There is only one thing for it: Leveson, The Musical. People at The Poke website must have had to watch hours and hours of testimony to come up with this offering. Suffice to say we know exactly what they feel like. We hope you enjoy the show. 

Obama's 'kill list'

Robert Grenier
Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm.

Short-term counterterrorism efforts undermine the United States' long-term goals: to prevent safe havens for terrorists.

Last Modified: 04 Jun 2012 11:07

LINK: Obama's 'kill list' - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Washington, DC - "Don't believe what you read in the papers," my father used to say. And as with most of the sage advice I ignored in my youth, experience would later prove him to be right. It eventually occurred to me when in government that if on topics I knew as an insider the press was at least half wrong, it was unlikely that they could be right on everything else.

And so it is with some scepticism that one should greet the latest journalistic sensation which has set tongues wagging and the blogosphere ablaze in Washington: Last Tuesday's blockbuster article in the New York Times concerning drone operations and US President Barak Obama's counterterrorism "kill list". The piece is putatively based on interviews with some three dozen current or former Obama administration advisers. As at least one wag has pointed out, an article featuring that degree of willing cooperation from the administration might more accurately be labelled a press release. Indeed, as one might expect given the context, the take-away is highly complimentary of the President and, presumably, highly advantageous to him politically, save perhaps among the sort of left-leaning hand-wringers with whom Obama's Republican political opponents would love to see him identified.

Here in the pages of the New York Times we see the stern, steely-eyed American president, prepared to do what is necessary to defend the nation against its terrorist enemies, dealing death from the air at a pace which would put George W Bush to shame, first in Pakistan and now in Yemen, as well. But here also we see a model of benign, humanitarian restraint, determined to limit civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible by imposing his personal discipline on an otherwise rampant national security structure. And finally we see the lawyerly paragon of justice who, as advised by his warrior-priest counterterrorism advisor, insists upon taking personal moral responsibility for the targeted assassinations through which the US war on terror is, in important part, being waged. Not content to delegate to others the ultimate decisions of life and death, this president insists upon personal approval of every addition to the death roster after an elaborate bureaucratic process through which, putatively, only those targets which pose an imminent threat and who are not otherwise susceptible of capture are winnowed out. And when judgments must be made as to whether a target poses a sufficient threat to justify the collateral killing of innocents, it is the president himself who weighs the scales.

Creating an image

In US political terms, the broad outline of this profile as traced by the president's minions past and present could hardly be more laudatory, appealing to as broad a spectrum of domestic opinion as any highly political chief executive could hope. This should make us wary - wary enough to look at the details. And given the impossibility of controlling an aggregate message to which dozens have contributed, there are details indeed, many of which do not accord with the broad themes the White House is promoting.

One can start with the White House's insistent profession that it employs this brand of violence with such limited firepower, such precision and such restraint as to have avoided "collateral" killing to an almost preternatural extent. Honestly, what are we to make of this? This narrative hardly accords with the oft-reported fact of "signature strikes" in Pakistan, in which the identities of the intended targets are simply not known. The fact is that in Pakistan the US has gone far beyond a limited campaign against international terrorists, and appears instead to have embraced the drone strike as a counter-insurgency tool, employed regularly against militant gatherings which appear to represent a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. And as for the supposedly carefully drawn distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the New York Times reports that this has simply become a matter of definitition: Now, any male of fighting age in the militant-influenced tribal areas of Pakistan is deemed an enemy - which, given prevailing popular sentiments in those areas, may not be far from the truth. We have come to a place where the distinctions among terrorists, militants, and mere sympathisers have largely lost their meaning, and where the differences between intended and unintended consequences of US actions have simply ceased to matter.

Perhaps all of this was inevitable. But as a description of messy reality, it hardly accords with the almost antiseptically clean moral image which the Nobel Peace Prize-winning occupant of the Oval Office wishes to convey to his more left-leaning constituency in the US.

Slippery slopes

Unsurprisingly, then, this week has also brought us yet more press evidence that the US has put itself on a similarly slippery slope in Yemen. Strikes against individuals who pose a clear and present danger of international terrorism have inflamed local sympathisers of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to join them, which in turn has led to many more, and more broadly-targeted strikes. Now we see journalists, perhaps reflecting a similar inability in the US national security establishment to make important practical distinctions, referring to the domestic militants of the heretofore parochial Yemeni organisation Ansar al-Sharia as a wing of al-Qaeda. More significantly, popular anger over innocent casualties is rapidly eroding the willingness of anti-militant tribal forces to take actions against al-Qaeda-supporting local militants which they would otherwise be motivated to take. Just as we have seen elsewhere, American short-term counterterrorism goals are working against, and permanently undermining, the far more important goal of denying safe haven to the terrorist.

To describe the problem is not at all the same as prescribing the solution. But as last Tuesday's New York Times article also makes clear, political considerations in the US will continue to make it impossible for US policymakers to take the risks which a wiser and more discriminating approach to counterterrorism would demand, in Pakistan, in Yemen, and elsewhere. The nearly successful effort to bring down a US airliner landing in Detroit on Christmas Day of 2009, we are told, had a visceral effect on President Obama. Under circumstances where that sort of risk is not an option, a slide down a slippery slope instead becomes a race to the bottom of lowest-common-denominator counterterrorism policy.

It has been said that the Roman Empire was forced to conquer the known world in self-defence. America's counterterrorism policy has placed it on an analogous path. In the face of such domestic political fear, there is simply no countervailing power to stop it.

Robert Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Henry Kissinger
Henry A Kissinger is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for both the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations.

The future of US-Chinese relations

Conflict is a choice, not a necessity.

Last Modified: 04 Jun 2012 12:26

Kent, CT- On January 19, 2011, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao issued a joint statement at the end of Hu's visit to Washington. It proclaimed their shared commitment to a "positive, cooperative, and comprehensive US-China relationship". Each party reassured the other regarding his principal concern, announcing, "The United States reiterated that it welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a greater role in world affairs. China welcomes the United States as an Asia-Pacific nation that contributes to peace, stability and prosperity in the region."

Since then, the two governments have set about implementing the stated objectives. Top American and Chinese officials have exchanged visits and institutionalised their exchanges on major strategic and economic issues. Military-to-military contacts have been restarted, opening an important channel of communication. And at the unofficial level, so-called track-two groups have explored possible evolutions of the US-Chinese relationship.

Yet as cooperation has increased, so has controversy. Significant groups in both countries claim that a contest for supremacy between China and the United States is inevitable and perhaps already under way. In this perspective, appeals for US-Chinese cooperation appear outmoded and even naive.

The mutual recriminations emerge from distinct yet parallel analyses in each country. Some American strategic thinkers argue that Chinese policy pursues two long-term objectives: displacing the United States as the preeminent power in the western Pacific; and consolidating Asia into an exclusionary bloc deferring to Chinese economic and foreign policy interests. In this conception, even though China's absolute military capacities are not formally equal to those of the United States, Beijing possesses the ability to pose unacceptable risks in a conflict with Washington and is developing increasingly sophisticated means to negate traditional US advantages. Its invulnerable second-strike nuclear capability will eventually be paired with an expanding range of antiship ballistic missiles and asymmetric capabilities in new domains such as cyberspace and space. China could secure a dominant naval position through a series of island chains on its periphery, some fear, and once such a screen exists, China's neighbours, dependent as they are on Chinese trade and uncertain of the United States' ability to react, might adjust their policies according to Chinese preferences. Eventually, this could lead to the creation of a Sinocentric Asian bloc dominating the western Pacific. The most recent US defence strategy report reflects, at least implicitly, some of these apprehensions.

No Chinese government officials have proclaimed such a strategy as China's actual policy. Indeed, they stress the opposite. However, enough material exists in China's quasi-official press and research institutes to lend some support to the theory that relations are heading for confrontation rather than cooperation.

US strategic concerns are magnified by ideological predispositions to battle with the entire nondemocratic world. Authoritarian regimes, some argue, are inherently brittle, impelled to rally domestic support by nationalist and expansionist rhetoric and practice. In these theories - versions of which are embraced in segments of both the American left and the American right - tension and conflict with China grow out of China's domestic structure. Universal peace will come, it is asserted, from the global triumph of democracy rather than from appeals for cooperation. The political scientist Aaron Friedberg writes, for example, that "a liberal democratic China will have little cause to fear its democratic counterparts, still less to use force against them". Therefore, "stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [should be] to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China's one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal democracy in its place".

On the Chinese side, the confrontational interpretations follow an inverse logic. They see the United States as a wounded superpower determined to thwart the rise of any challenger, of which China is the most credible. No matter how intensely China pursues cooperation, some Chinese argue, Washington's fixed objective will be to hem in a growing China by military deployment and treaty commitments, thus preventing it from playing its historic role as the Middle Kingdom. In this perspective, any sustained cooperation with the United States is self-defeating, since it will only serve the overriding US objective of neutralising China. Systematic hostility is occasionally considered to inhere even in American cultural and technological influences, which are sometimes cast as a form of deliberate pressure designed to corrode China's domestic consensus and traditional values. The most assertive voices argue that China has been unduly passive in the face of hostile trends and that (for example, in the case of territorial issues in the South China Sea) China should confront those of its neighbours with which it has disputed claims and then, in the words of the strategic analyst Long Tao, "reason, think ahead and strike first before things gradually run out of hand... launch[ing] some tiny-scale battles that could deter provocateurs from going further".

This is an excerpt from the essay "The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations" from the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Henry A Kissinger is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for both the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

UN soldiers killed in Ivory Coast ambush

Seven peacekeepers from Niger killed while on patrol near the border with Liberia.

Last Modified: 09 Jun 2012 04:05

The United Nations has confirmed that seven peacekeepers have been killed in an ambush in the Ivory Coast, the first attack of its kind in the country.

"This attack cost the lives of seven UNOCI peacekeeping soldiers from Niger," the peacekeeping mission said in a statement. "These soldiers were on patrol in the region of Tai, in a zone where UNOCI recently increased its presence due to a threat of civilian operations being attacked."

A UN source told the AFP news agency that the peacekeepers were patrolling near two villages, Para and Tai. A resident of Para said that villagers were fleeing from fighting in the area.

"There's panic in the villages, many are fleeing into the forest, others are heading for Liberia," the resident said.

UN reaction

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was "outraged" by the killing and that more troops remained in danger.

"Even tonight, after the attack, more than 40 peacekeepers remain with the villagers in this remote region to protect them from this armed group," Ban told reporters.

The mission, called UNOCI, was started in 2003 in the midst of the country's years-long civil war. It saw extensive action following the presidential election in 2010, after the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, proclaimed himself the winner.

It took months for forces loyal to the opposition candidate, Alassane Ouattara, to dislodge Gbagbo; UN troops fired on Gbagbo's troops and took control of the airport in the capital Abidjan during that time.

The western part of Ivory Coast remains deeply unstable, and has been plagued by deadly attacks since the post-election crisis abated. In a report published Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said at least 40 people have been killed since July 2011 in raids the group blamed on fighters loyal to Gbagbo.

Gbagbo was captured on April 11, 2011 and has been in custody in The Hague since November on allegations of crimes against humanity.

UNOCI has about 11,000 troops, military observers and police in Ivory Coast. Up to Friday, 60 troops, 15 police, one military observer and 14 international and local civilian staff have been killed.

Palestinians mull observer status at UN

Palestinian Authority looks to mimic Vatican's non-member status as Israel continues with settlement expansions.

Last Modified: 08 Jun 2012 23:37

 

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, has warned that he may seek to upgrade the Palestinian status at the United Nations to a non-member observer state if peace talks with Israel do not resume.

At a Paris news conference on Friday with Francois Hollande, the French president, Abbas made good on months of speculation that the Palestinians might seek to circumvent pledges by the United States, Israel's stalwart ally, to block any Palestinian bid for full UN membership in the Security Council.

"We went to the Security Council. We did not obtain the vote necessary," Abbas said.

"If we don't return to the (peace) negotiations, we'll of course go to the General Assembly to obtain the status of non-member state, as is the case for the Vatican ... "

There are no vetoes in the General Assembly and adoption of a resolution could upgrade the Palestinians' current status as a permanent observer to a non-member observer state.

While this would not give the Palestinians voting rights in the world body, it would give them international recognition as a "state" and the possibility of joining UN agencies and becoming parties to treaties including the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court.

Abbas did not specify when the Palestinians might take their bid to the General Assembly and he indicated it would not be easy. "Of course, we are going to encounter many obstacles," he said.

Last fall, the Palestinians made a bid for full UN membership, but it remains stalled.

US blocks UN bid

For Palestine to become a UN member state, it needs a recommendation from the UN Security Council, which means a minimum of nine "yes" votes and no veto by a permanent member.

The US who has opposed this, insists on a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before Palestine joins the UN.

The US says it would veto a resolution recommending membership now - leaving the Palestinians the option of going to the 193-member General Assembly, where there are no vetoes.

The Palestinians have said they will not resume talks until Israel halts illegal settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied territories that the Palestinians claim for a future state.

They also want assurances that the borders of a future Palestine should be based on Israel's lines before the 1967 Mideast war, when it captured the territories.

"As for the negotiations, I just want to say that the ball is in Mr. Netanyahu's court," said Abbas, referring to Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

"If Mr. Netanyahu agrees to end the colonisation and recognise the borders, we will be inclined to take steps in this direction."

EU deplores new settlements

Meanwhile, the European Union urged Israel on Friday to shelve plans to build 850 new apartments in the West Bank, saying such projects are hurting the peace process. The UN has deemed such settlement activity illegal.

Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said she deplored the government's decision to go ahead with the new construction, adding that such settlements "threaten to make the two-state solution impossible."

Israel said on Wednesday it would build the units in West Bank settlements.

The announcement came after parliament rejected an attempt by hardline legislators to prevent the demolition of an outpost that the Supreme Court said was built illegally on privately held Palestinian land.

Palestinians have refused to resume negotiations while Israel builds on land they claim for a future state. Israel says settlements and other core issues should be resolved through talks.